Bringing Back the Extended Family and Community

A look at moving away from a nuclear family and to an extended family structure and building community. While also exploring how 1950s marketing pushed the idea of the nuclear family.

My family is Choctaw and we have maintained a strong family history from Removal to Indian Territory to now. And part of that history shows how we continued the matriarchal values of our Choctaw traditions.

During my childhood though I had no idea the way we lived was no longer the norm. Even today I often think back and understand just how rare my upbringing was and is still.

I’m going to share a lot of my family story to first give context to this resource but if you just want to get to the ways it can help your own family feel free to skip this next section but I do hope you will take the time to read it.

My Childhood Living in an Extended Family

In the 1870s, my 3x great grandpa and grandma ended up in the part of south central Chickasaw Nation (Oklahoma, at the time Indian Territory) where I still live.

They started my large family that still is mostly living in the same part of Oklahoma and has remained close after these multiple generations. And this is in part thanks to my 3x great grandpa, unfortunately like many women of the time my 3x great grandma died very young. He was known as Uncle Tom to not just family but all that knew him. He modeled that idea that you care for those around you like family. He also made all of his children had land, which he got through the Dawes Act, when he passed away.

My cousin continued to farm the family land given during allotment until very recently. Parts of that original land still remain in the family to this day. Part of it is also now a cemetery where my 3x great grandpa was buried and most of my family since.

My great grandparents moved their family to California in the 1950s. While living in California my family stayed connected, often living in the same neighborhoods or even as neighbors with the kids (my mom and her cousins) going between each other’s houses and growing up together.

Part of the family moved back in the 1970s and most of the rest moved back in 1980. At this time my grandpa, my great uncle, and other family members bought around 600 acres all connected near where are family had originally come from in Chickasaw Nation (Oklahoma). That land is still in my family. It’s the land I grew up on.

Holidays and celebrations of all kinds were never just my nuclear family, it always included not only my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and first cousins but also my great aunts and uncles, my more distant cousins, and often “family” that explaining how they ended up adopted into my family would take charts and much longer than you want to read.

Someone always had an extra person living with them, we all just went around to each other’s homes and you never felt like a guest but just like you belonged and what was theirs was also yours. And this still continues.

Unlike the pushed narrative of the nuclear family this idea of an extended family community, where everyone took part in raising kids and taking care of each other’s needs, created our own safety net. It also created a very happy childhood filled with love.

This is a very compressed story of my family history and my childhood but it’s just to highlight briefly a family structure that has largely been pushed away due to the push of the nuclear family and “progress.”

The focus wasn’t really on family but was on making people better and more productive workers because we became more reliant on others and big corporations.

Now let’s talk about what the heck a nuclear family is and how it became the “American ideal.”

What is the Nuclear Family and How Did it Become the Norm

Recently I talked about the nuclear family being a marketing scam on my social media and was met with some pushback that made it clear many don’t fully understand what that term even means, so let’s start there.

“A family group that consists only of parents and children.” – Merriam Webster

While pushed that a nuclear family is putting family first, is it really? Why is an isolated part of a family pushed so much and when did it start?

This is a long history so I will point you to a PBS video giving a brief overview of this history. But the TL;DR is the poverty, the Industrial Age, and Christianity played big roles in this family structure. And the term nuclear family started being used in the 1920s and the 1950s is when we start to see it as the American ideal.

And that’s where my statement that the nuclear family is a marketing scam comes in. There was the Cold War, an economic boom, a push for suburban living, a growing middle class, and of course the baby boom.

So how did marketing play a role? Good ole propaganda. White middle and upper classes were pushed this idea that to be a proper and successful family you should be a nuclear family. Dad goes to work and mom raises the kids.

You see it in everything from programming that was aired on TV both “educational” and entertainment. It was also used by advertisers to sell just about everything.

Nuclear families are more convenient for capitalism but history shows us they aren’t the norm and they have big flaws. Now this is again very much the cliff notes version of all of this because it’s already quite long but it does give us some idea of why the nuclear family is pushed and why it may not be the best option.

How do we move away from that and back to an extended family and community mindset? Well some of that change will need to come from the top but we can make some changes within our own families as well.

How to Bring Back the Extended Family

First I want to address that many people don’t know their extended family but when I say extended family I’m not just talking about your blood family. My own extended family includes many that share no blood with us but our bonds are just as strong. Kinship was not so cut and dry in history, this is true within my own Choctaw heritage.

Creating Your Extended Family

Since we’ve established that an extended family is not always just made up of blood family, the first step to all of this is figuring out who is your extended family.

This will take time and may involve building new relationships with people that share your goals. And these days your extended family is unlikely to live on 600 acres together and is more likely to not even live in the same town but technology can be our friend here.

While being physically close is ideal we can still create closeness and help each other using technology. So don’t limit your idea of who your extended family can be by location or blood.

Creating Community

Start finding ways to not only get together for fun but also to help each other. For example, I grew up with very little being hired outside of the family.

If there was a plumbing issue my grandpa was a licensed plumber and could help. Car trouble? My dad was a mechanic and my uncle was also good with cars. Needed child care? Send them to one of the cousin’s houses or to my great grandma. A lot of help like this can be done remotely by helping talk someone through fixing something or even things like homework help if there is a subject the parents can’t help with.

Hands are always available. Another example of this is when there was a bad wildfire on the family land. It started at a cousin’s house and quickly spread to my grandparent’s land and threatened to move to other cousin’s land as well.

Of course fire departments were there but countless cousins showed up as well. They helped move things out of danger, use hoses and buckets to save the homes, and also helped with cleanup. Thankfully the homes were saved and no one was badly hurt.

This can also look like mutual aid. Making sure everyone’s basic needs are met. And this isn’t done as loans, which can get messy within families, but as simply a way to help each other with no strings.

Think creatively and with a community mindset.

This may not have been as much of a how-to as most of my blog posts but I hope it helps you start thinking differently and sparks some ideas for your own family.

You can also ask questions in the comments, email me, or reach out on my social media (I’m Retro Housewife Goes Green in all the places). I’m happy to try and help in anyway I can.

More Family and Community Resources

Want to read more about family life and community? Here are so more resources you will find here on the site.

• How to Have Community Building Parties Like a Woman in WW2
• The Supportive Bonds of 1950s Housewife Communities